A Couple Grow Older Along With Their Debit Card in a Nostalgic Danish Spot

Dankort Demonstrates How Our Plastic Has Evolved

By Alexandra Jardine.Published on Jun 13, 2017

Editor's Pick

Danish debit card brand Dankort shows how out plastic has evolved over the years with a nostalgic tale of a couple who meet in the '80s and grow older together.

The ad starts in 1984 at a New Year's party, as our hero spritzes his hair with hairpsray and our heroine disco-dances in a glittery top. He plays first-generation video games, while she's into Jane Fonda-style aerobics. They meet when he goes to the video store where she works to rent some VHS tapes, and she swipes his card with a carbon copy-style machine. As they date, get married and have kids, we see them using their debit card again and again in evolving contraptions. Finally the couple, now middle-aged, are in a store and he's forgotten his card. However, his wife has downloaded Dankort's mobile app and can simply wave her phone in order to pay.

Like all time travel-style ads (see Tesco's Christmas effort from a few years ago), the entertainment value is in the detail of how accurately the different decades are captured, from clothes to hairstyles to decor. The agency (Baby, Copenhagen) and director (Bacon's Tomas Jonsgården) did a pretty good job, and the music track, "Inside World" by Danish band WhoMadeWho, sounds suitably '80s-inspired.